Boulder County, for example, once was the home of as many as 25 local granges, but now has only two active granges within its borders, according to local historian Anne Dyni.

One is the Left Hand Grange, which was organized in December 1873 and has been meeting for the past 70 years in a two-story frame structure at Second Avenue and Franklin Street in Old Town Niwot that was built in 1905.

The other is the Altona Grange, which was organized in February 1891 and has been meeting for the past 116 years in a building it erected west of Longmont, at what's now North 39th Street and Nelson Road.

"As they did in years past, the Altona and Left Hand granges in Boulder County continue to serve the needs of the surrounding rural community," said Dyni, a past president of the Niwot Historical Society who's researched and reported on the establishment and evolution of the Grange movement in the county.

"Although the emphasis on agricultural has waned since the 1950s," Grange buildings such as Left Hand's and Altona's "still function as meeting and reception halls, concert venues and exhibit space for local clubs, Scouts and musical groups. Those granges that survive today are successfully meeting the changing needs of a modern society," Dyni said recently.

Denise Grimm, a Boulder County Land Use Department senior planner whose assignments include working on the designation and preservation of historic county landmarks, said granges such as Left Hand and Altona "are another reminder of what our communities were all about at one time."

Grimm said grange buildings, along with the old churches, schools and original farm structures that remain on the land "represent local history," and that the granges, in particular, are among "a few remaining examples of how people organized among themselves and socialized with one another."

The Altona Grange has been meeting for the past 116 years in this building along Nelson Road west of Longmont. (Lewis Geyer/Times-Call)
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LEWIS GEYER
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In a 1992 paper Dyni wrote for the Boulder Historic Context Project, she said the national Grange movement began after the Civil War, "at a time rural Americans were battling prohibitive loan interest rates and unjust price fixing by the railroads.

"Farmers seemed destined to remain voiceless and geographically isolated," Dyni wrote, until they created a self-help organization -- the Patrons of Husbandry, the National Grange -- in late 1867. Local Colorado granges began forming by the early 1870s, and the Colorado Territorial Grange was organized in 1874.

"Obviously, we're not as agricultural in this area as we once were," said Niwot resident Dorinda Dembroski, Left Hand Grange's secretary.

Dembroski said local granges can continue to serve a function, though, "especially for those of us in the unincorporated areas of the county."

She said that's meant that granges have had "to refocus to meet the needs of where they are today." At Left Hand, which Dembroski said is now the oldest active local grange in Colorado, "we work very hard" at maintaining a sense of community and service to that community.

That, Arbuthnot said, includes "serving our community and offering health and well-being for our members."

The Altona Grange's mission, as stated on its website, is "to provide an organization and building facility to support a community of people who care about their world, their community and the history of their community."

But "we definitely don't want to say that we're only there for the rural community," Arbuthnot emphasized.

"It used to be a requirement that you had to be a farmer or had to be in agriculture to be a member of the grange," said Arbuthnot, a Lafayette resident whose family arrived in Colorado in 1859 and lived on a ranch near Haystack Mountain until 1924.

Grange members didn't want railroad employees in their midst or at their meetings, for example, because they were working for the companies that "fixed the prices" farmers got for their crops and livestock, Arbuthnot said.

Now, she said, "City folks and anybody who would like to become part of our community is welcome to join."

Arbuthnot said she got involved with Altona Grange several years ago when its members were trying to reorganize and rejuvenate the grange hall itself, which she said "was in pretty bad shape."

Recent years' projects to repair and restore the Left Hand and Altona halls may be one key to the rejuvenation and continuation of those local organizations, as well.

And their events calendars provide clues to what they now offer their communities.

The Altona Grange has been holding a series of agricultural education forums, on topics ranging from "The Basics of Food Preservation" -- canning, freezing, fermenting and drying -- to "Raising Chickens in Your Back Yard."

Altona also is the venue for bluegrass concerts, yoga classes and book club meetings.

Keeping the grange hall open meets a basic rural community need, Left Hand's Dembroski said, by "providing a space for people to meet."

Meanwhile, at least two of Colorado's other existing local granges are located not far from Boulder County.

To the south in Broomfield is the Crescent Grange Hall at 7901 W. 120th Ave., which was built in 1906, when that part of Broomfield was still part of Boulder County. Broomfield became its own county in 2001.

To Longmont and Boulder County's east -- at 2029 Colo. Highway 66, at Weld County Road 5 -- is the Liberty Hall Grange, organized in June 1945. Its membership once included many of northeast Boulder County's farm families as well as southwest Weld's.

"We're not very active, but we're still in operation," said farmer Bill Sipe, a member of the Liberty Hall Grange board who lives a couple of miles south of that grange hall.

Liberty Hall Grange's brown brick building, a onetime country schoolhouse, is primarily now the home of a Masonic lodge -- Garfield Lodge No. 50 -- a tenant that reroofed and renovated the hall while generally leaving its external appearance intact. That, Sipe said, was something Liberty Hall Grange members wanted, "to keep it as is."

Sipe said the Liberty Hall Grange still has its own periodic meetings there, and that under the sharing arrangement with the Masons, the building continues to be used for 4-H clubs' meetings.

Colorado State Grange secretary Marsha Sassman said that since the movement began in Colorado, 497 local granges started up and existed for at least a time. Now, she said, there are 57 active granges in the state, and the focus of many of the surviving locals -- in Colorado as well as the rest of the nation -- has shifted from a primarily agricultural emphasis to a broader community service approach.

Notwithstanding their current community roles, those and other surviving granges played a key part in rural history, Dyni noted in her 1992 paper.

Dyni wrote that while grange numbers had diminished nationwide, the national movement "played a vital part in the transition from rural simplicity in the 1860s to the agribusiness of the 1990s."

As the result of the grange's involvement, Dyni said, "the Department of Agriculture was created, transportation monopolies were controlled, rural mail delivery was introduced, a good road system was established, and pure-food legislation was enacted. Most important of all, farm families were given a voice which was heard by legislators and corporations across the country."

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